Staten Island's new Parks chief advocates sharing of the green

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- As Adena Long steps into her new role as borough Parks commissioner, she wants Staten Islanders to know that their priorities are her own.

To the elected officials: She wants to work with you.

"I come from a school of thought that you sort of get consensus before you make decisions as opposed to sort of convincing people that what you've done was the right thing," she said. "I want to make sure that gets folded into how we do business on the Island from now on."

Ms. Long, 39, a St. George resident, replaces longtime Borough Parks Commissioner Thomas Paulo, who retired on Labor Day. She was selected from among 10 finalists who applied for the position, both internally and externally.

Only days into the job, the former Greenbelt administrator, whose career with Parks began in 1997, is setting an agenda she said will be built on communication. Joined yesterday by Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe for a sit-down interview with the Advance at the Greenbelt Nature Center, Ms. Long outlined her goals and expressed a desire to mend fences with elected officials.

Among her first orders of business, she said, is to schedule meetings with local legislators. They have long been vocal critics of Parks, though tensions have escalated recently stemming from the decision to reclaim the land occupied by the Cedar Grove Beach Club and the reallocation of millions of dollars to purchase the Goodhue Center.

"Our first step it to meet early and to meet often," she said. "We want to make sure their priorities and our capacity mesh so that we can do great programs and great projects to serve the community."

The public, she said, is equally important in directing her agenda.

"We are public servants," she said. "It's what we do. To discount what the public needs and wants would be tragic."

Still, she remains aware of the challenge that awaits as city agencies will once again be asked to slash their budgets in the new year.

"This won't be the first time the economic climate has affected the Parks Department," she said. "It's time not to sit back on our laurels, but really to sort of engage the community and remind them of where we are.

"We're not flush and we don't want to take steps backward. We want to continue to provide clean, safe parks and make improvements. Funding makes it a challenge, but I don't see any reason we can't move forward with initiatives."

As executive director of the nonprofit Greenbelt Conservancy and administrator of the Greenbelt -- the city's second-largest park, at 2,800 acres -- she increased staffing, expanded programming and guided the construction of the $9 million nature center.

Ms. Long, who most recently served as Parks' principal strategic planner, calls her work there "the cornerstone and turning point of my Parks career."

In her new role, she will oversee hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded projects and the recreational resources of the borough with the most parks in the city.

Among those is the $1.4 billion transformation of the former Fresh Kills landfill.

Moving forward, she will think back to her philosophy as she watched the nature center come to life.

"People use the parks in different ways, and we wanted to provide a venue for them to do everything they wanted," she said.